Rosalind Krauss

University Professor of 20th-Century Art and Theory, Columbia University

It was 1999. I had just given a Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture in London, in honor of the founder of Thames & Hudson. Its title was “ ‘A Voyage on the North Sea,’ Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition.”

From there I went to Barcelona to work at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona on a proposed exhibition. The museum was staging the work of William Kentridge and between working sessions, I went to look at the show. One of the animated films was Ubu Tells the Truth. At one point the Johannesburg Police Building appears in close-up, its luminous windows framed in black, the image of frames of film—the very picture, that is, of the work’s medium.

After this is a sequence of prisoners plunging downwards from the building’s rooftop, their black forms passing the luminous windows as they fall. The illusion created is that the windows are a filmstrip rising behind the falling bodies as if to rewind into the gate of the projector. Twice, then, Ubu stages the medium in which it is made—scoffing at the contemporary contempt for “medium specificity” that is the hallmark of the decades-long tradition of modernism, a contempt that had spawned the many multimedia productions of installation art, which I had identified as “Art in the Age of Post-Medium Condition.”

As the brilliance and truth of Kentridge’s work was revealed in that moment, it showed the continuing presence of that modernism I thought (and think) necessary to instill art with meaning.